A Future Less Vivid
by CheshireEmpress
Summary: Booster Gold is pretty sure that Blue Beetle should still be alive.


**Author's Notes:** A few years ago, my Latin teacher introduced me to a rather obscure grammatical structure called the "future less vivid". It is, apparently, such an obscure structure that I've never seen it again, but the name was pretty unforgettable, and I've been meaning to use it as a title ever since. And what story could possibly deserve that title more than one about a man from the future who doesn't know what's going to happen?

Please forgive any mistakes in recent canon, as I've had trouble finding OMAC. Since I have no clue what TPTB will decide to do with Booster anyway, it's probably better to consider this going AU after OMAC #2.

**A Future Less Vivid**

There's nothing left for him in the past now, but time travel technology won't be invented for another 36 years (and it won't be perfected until 17 years after that, thanks to the efforts of a large alarmist faction and the subsequent years of ethical-review-boards purgatory). It's possible, of course, that some hero- or villain-type has already created the technology, but Booster isn't in the mood to deal with villains right now and the only hero he can think of with the necessary resources is Batman. He isn't in the mood to deal with Batman, either.

So he goes back to Florida, where Gladys meets him at the door. Someone, apparently, has called ahead to tell her about... what happened. She sits him down on her overstuffed floral monstrosity of a sofa, tells him how sorry she is, and then holds him while he cries. Booster hasn't let himself cry in front of the JLA, or even alone with Bea (who had arrived at J'onn's summons and attached herself to Booster, her makeup looking suspiciously streaky). But here, with no image to maintain and no dignity left to lose, he can let the tears fall without worrying about girly sobs or childish sniffles. Gladys sits beside him in full-on grandmother mode (she actually, at one point, pulls a tissue out of her sleeve for him), and when his sobs have worked themselves down to hurt-animal whimpers, he allows himself the comfort of falling asleep with his head in her lap while she ruffles fingers through his hair.

He remembers sleeping like this as a child, safe under his mother's protection. If he could do it, right this second, Booster would go back (forward?) in time and stop himself from growing up. He's screwed up somewhere-- he's pretty sure that Ted shouldn't have died for at least another twenty years. That means something has changed this timeline, and he doesn't know of any other timejumpers; this _has_ to be his fault. It is, Booster supposes, yet another black mark in his record: tries to save his mother and gets caught up in crime, tries to be a hero and kills his best friend.

Booster wakes up alone on the sofa, with a blanket draped over him and a pillow tucked under his head. It's dark outside, and a quick check reveals Gladys sleeping peacefully in their bedroom, so Booster slips out to the kitchen. He feels hollow and cold inside, and the tuna salad sandwiches he finds in the fridge don't fill him. He thinks about making coffee, but opts at the last minute for cocoa instead. There aren't any marshmallows in the pantry, and Booster feels silly for even looking, but he hasn't had cocoa in years and marshmallows had been something of a habit back then. He finishes his cocoa-with-no-marshmallows and rinses out the mug. He should really join Gladys in bed, he thinks, but he finds himself wandering back to the sofa. The blanket Gladys left him is heavy, and the weight makes a comforting pressure on his body when he curls up underneath it. He isn't expecting to fall back asleep, but when he feels drowsy blackness creeping up his neck, he lets it overtake him. Thinking is just too much effort at the moment, and anyway his thoughts are so bleak that Booster is glad to escape them.

When he wakes up the next morning, the cold hollowness inside him isn't as noticeable. Booster takes a deep breath and holds it; doesn't exhale until his lungs start to burn. He can hear Gladys stirring in the bedroom, and he brings her a tray with toast and tea. He gives her his best grateful smile, which she returns, patting the bed beside her. He crawls in, and they spend the morning watching old sitcoms on Lifetime. Booster tries hard not to think about how much the butler on "The Nanny" reminds him of L-Ron, with a fair degree of success. If this is coping, he thinks, then he can cope.

But the weather is hot and humid, and there are beetles crawling all over the city. Not blue ones, thankfully, but the little brown beetles are still enough to make Booster think of Ted. The first time he sees one squashed on the sidewalk, he has to duck down an alleyway to throw up, huddled over on his knees retching behind a dumpster. After that, he keeps his eyes off the ground as much as possible.

Booster isn't a superhero anymore, but he's forgotten to change the flags on his email account, and an article turns up in his inbox about the negative psychological effects a superhero might have on his or her city. "What about the negative psychological effects a superhero can have on a washed-up has-been jock five hundred years from now?" Booster wants to scream, but Gladys is in the dining room with her mah-jongg club, and so he settles for biting his tongue until it _hurts_ and deleting the offending email with a particularly vicious click of the mouse button. He goes out to the pool and swims until he can convince himself that it's only twentieth-century chlorine making his eyes burn.

Perhaps a week later, he channel-surfs into a show about time travel. It's fictional, of course, but the writers have clearly done some research on theory, and the characters' anxiety about changing the past rings so uneasily true that Booster starts to flip past it, but then the main character starts a rant about how he can't tell what he shouldn't meddle with because history has gotten some things muddled and others outright wrong, so even when he tries not to disrupt the timeline, he does it anyway because his knowledge is incorrect-- and Booster is watching with his mouth hanging open. He turns off the television to concentrate as hard as he can on the superhero history he remembers. It isn't much; he didn't study very long or very hard before he came here, and now that he's here, he's been actively trying not to think about what his memories tell him, because he doesn't trust himself to save (to not save?) people's lives when he knows they should die. It's just easier not to know at all.

But Booster definitely remembers something about a battle coming up in 2017, a battle where Blue Beetle will do (would have done?) something decisive. And if Blue Beetle is dead, then he shouldn't remember that, should he? His first thought is that Ted must still be alive somewhere. His second thought, which falls like a bucket of cold water over the first, is that he can't remember any reference to Ted Kord being Blue Beetle. And his third thought, a flash of epiphany, is that if Blue Beetle's identity is unknown, then he'll just have to make sure that a hero calling himself Blue Beetle exists.

Booster stands outside the rubble that was Ted's house, grateful that no one seems to have disturbed the debris yet. Something catches his eye, and he turns to see a pile ofstones emitting a faint blue glow. That looks like a good place to start, so Booster heads over and starts digging. Fifteen minutes later he sits back on his heels, clutching Dan Garrett's blue scarab in his hand. He hopes it will work for him. If it doesn't, he'll just have to keep it safe until he finds the right person.


End file.
